The end of a training

Just finished off another set of Church Member trainings in HIV care today. 4 day-long sessions - interspersed at fortnightly intervals.

Each batch has its own unique flavour.

Today we were discussing death and how to help people who are dying. While we held the session in the meeting hall used by the Bethesda Assembly, just a wall away in our JSK centre, little Satish was fighting for life (note - it looks like he may pull through - he ate a whole banana on his own tonight - and some fish).

One of the salient points that came out again and again is that we are able to face dying - because of Lord Jesus has himself gone through the bitterness of death - and is able to help us with courage and hope. The other is that we are being comforted through Him and are able to comfort others in any kind of trouble (2 Cor. 1.4).

As we reviewed the training with our participants and staff we can only say that we are very grateful - all of us - for the learning experience we had together. An exercise we did was to stand in a circle. One person held a ball of red knitting wool. He or she then expressed something that touched us over the 4 sessions - and then threw the ball across the circle, while keeping hold of the end of the thread. The result was a beautiful web of red. We heard each point of the star as something that was to be thanked for.

Now that the training is over we need to see where our dear friends will take what they have learned. We were blessed to have 2 members of the Blessing Youth Mission who are working in rural Maharashtra and have come across many people with HIV. Other blessings were seeing local trainees meet people with HIV in their homes over the last 2 weeks.

This evening our youth from church discussed about how one of their 'mini-teams' have been visiting the home of a very sick person with HIV. Its sometimes not easy to visit him given his on-going illness and depression - but they are sticking with it - and have seen some small improvement in the man.

This is what we want to see take place - common people reaching out in love in the name and strength of our uncommon Lord Jesus.